Who am I? Who are you? No, this isn’t another drawn out Nintendo campaign, complete with Zelda’s SD head pasted on my body. It’s a question about women (specifically, women gamers), art, and identity.
Identity, gender expectations, societal roles: if you’ve ever checked out Heroine Sheik before, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of these words. In a recent back-and-forth debate between myself and a reader (see the comments for Monday’s post), I mentioned trying to understand “the sexual other”. The reader perceptively pointed out that, really, that’s what this site is all about. And male-dominanted society’s “sexual other” is none other than women themselves. Female gamers play a parallel role within the smaller gaming community. So just who is this person we call “woman”, and, by extension, who is her other: man? Moreover, why the hell can’t girls (like me) every stop talking about them, about identity?
This isn’t a post just about gaming. It’s applicable, to be sure, but what we’re looking at here is a larger trend in the creation and evaluation of art itself. Women who are part of an artistic movement which is considered inappropriate for their sex (Think of novel-writing in the late 18th century, or, I don’t know, the video game industry of today.) become, over and over again, obsessed with the idea of identity – precisely because the community around them doesn’t recognize their own. Because the selfhood of women is so unsure, because no full understanding of themselves will be offered unless they discover it, women must answer the question for themselves: Who am I? Which can only lead to: Who are you?
Men, on the other hand, are assured of their role in the society (in this case, one based on gaming). They, therefore, are not forced to explore their selfhood in order to assert it. They have already been empowered merely through their masculinity. Therefore, they are often less interested in issues like those of gender roles and sexuality, ones that are closely linked with the question of identity.
And the result? As women, we may not yet know for sure who we are? But we know more about men than they’re willing to discover about themselves.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
September 15th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
How does this apply to males who had or have one or both parents attempting to dissuade them from involvement with games?
How can a male be empowered through his masculinity when the society around him discourages expression of it? Male attributes and the “fight” response/reflex are universely reviled by journalist, politician, and teacher alike.
If women have the opportunity to explore their true identities, then men have an identity strictly defined by their peer group, one that binds them to certain personalities, actions, and interests, conflicting with the personalities, actions, and interests demanded by the world outside of their peer group.
If women must need explore to find their identity, men are blocked by the society around them from the opportunity to search it out.
September 16th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Lots of interesting points/questions…
How can a male be empowered through his masculinity when the society around him discourages expression of it?
Because, even if the most blatant displays of masculinity are discouraged, other, less carnal incarnations of it are not. We still admire men who are strong, brave, and protective, despite the fact that the ‘fight’ response, as you say, is reviled.
And I totally agree with you that men are bound by the very society which seems to offer them more freedom. Because women exist as “outsiders” in the gaming culture, they have more of a chance to explore and defy the definition of their identities. Men, on the other hand, are restricted by standing expectations, which, in some ways empowering, are also essentially self-nullifying.
It’s a complicated situation: a dialectic of self-hood, if you will (and I will :-)).
September 22nd, 2005 at 4:48 pm
I would say that both sexes have to assert themselves in any artistic medium for them to become acceptable. The reason you’re percieving the bias against women (in the case of 19th century novel writing, or the video gaming industry today) is because I think men more often assert themselves at the same time the media itself is being asserted. People were repulsed by gamers in general, and now male gamers have gotten the image pushed up a bit, but only for us.
I can think of examples (although not so much with western culture) where specific mediums were considered fit for females and not for males(Such as anything to do with reading and writing during the medeival ages), and only as the culture modernized and men asserted themselves in that particular medium did it become socially acceptable for them.
None of this isn’t to say that it’s always or even usually equally difficult for each sex.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:17 am
we have differnt hormones and extra curves and lumps and bumps i like being pleasently plump ( t / n /a )
ashley nicole